Freedom and finitude: A study of Heidegger and Foucault.

摘要

The primary task of this work is a comparative analysis of the understanding of 'freedom' as presented in the works of Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault. I argue that, taken together, Heidegger and Foucault represent the most systematic and coherent articulation since Marx of the notion that our primary experience of the world is not mediated by consciousness but is, instead, a practical relation. This position permits Heidegger and Foucault to cast freedom not as a property, status or standing to be achieved by the subject, nor as an end-state to be achieved through a developmental anthropology, but rather as an ethical relationship to a field of possibilities---an ethos--- and the practices that sustain this relationship. I use this discussion on freedom as a means of also contributing to two other debates, one regarding the general possibility of combining ontological and historical forms of critical analysis and the second, more specific question of Foucault's relationship to Heidegger.